Germany – Creative Commonshttps://creativecommons.org
Join us in building a more vibrant and usable global commons!Sat, 10 Dec 2016 01:02:59 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1https://creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/cc-site-icon-150x150.pngGermany – Creative Commonshttps://creativecommons.org
3232104997560School of Open returns to Berlin for a workshop with Wikimedia Germanyhttps://creativecommons.org/2013/02/20/school-of-open-returns-to-berlin-for-a-workshop-with-wikimedia-germany/
https://creativecommons.org/2013/02/20/school-of-open-returns-to-berlin-for-a-workshop-with-wikimedia-germany/#commentsWed, 20 Feb 2013 21:32:15 +0000https://creativecommons.org/?p=36835Wikimedia Office in Berlin / Hari Prasad Nadig / CC BY-SA On March 2nd, the Creative Commons & P2PU School of Open will join forces with Wikimedia at the Wikimedia Germany offices in Berlin! As part of Open Education Week, CC Germany and Wikimedia Germany are kicking things off early with a workshop to introduce … Read More "School of Open returns to Berlin for a workshop with Wikimedia Germany"

On March 2nd, the Creative Commons & P2PU School of Open will join forces with Wikimedia at the Wikimedia Germany offices in Berlin! As part of Open Education Week, CC Germany and Wikimedia Germany are kicking things off early with a workshop to introduce P2PU and the School of Open, and to create and translate School of Open courses in German, in addition to brainstorming ideas for new courses about Wikipedia as part of the School.

Event details

What: School of Open workshopWhen: 2nd of March, 11 – 16:00Where: Wikimedia Germany Offices, Obentrautstr. 72, 10963 BerlinWho: Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany, P2PU community, all enthusiastic promoters of free knowledge with the desire to share their knowledgeRSVP: Space will accommodate up to 25 participants; please send an email to legal@creativecommons.de by Feb 27th so that we can keep track of who’s coming.Language: Likely German

“We want to start the year with a workshop with Creative Commons and the initiative “School of Open”! The initiative of Creative Commons and the Peer-2-Peer University (P2PU) aims to develop online courses that help you create free content and tools to use and develop. There are English courses on Wikipedia and the use of free content, but as of yet nothing in German. Also, the subject of “free educational content” is not yet represented in courses. So there is still much to do. As part of Open Education Week further work is required.

Together, we want to work intensively on the expansion of the existing courses. It will focus on tools and topics related to free access to knowledge. Anyone can create courses and remix existing courses on their own — but it’s best to share. After some brief input from Creative Commons, we will start working. So bring your ideas, and let’s share our knowledge!”

To participate, please RSVP to legal@creativecommons.de by February 27th!

]]>The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (BY-SA) has been enforced by a judicial injunction in Germany. Legal analysis will be added to our case law database in the coming days. Till Jaeger reported the case (in German; English machine translation) at ifrOSS (Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software), where one may also find a PDF scan of the ruling. John Hendrik Weitzmann of CC Germany has provided an English translation of the ruling, below.

Thilo Sarrazin am 3. Juli 2009 by Nina Gerlach / CC BY-SAThe photo at left was used without providing attribution to the photographer and without providing notice of the license used, both core requirements of all CC licenses. This is an exciting ruling for CC, as the attribution and notice requirements are very clearly stated and upheld.

Additionally, we have been permitted to reveal that the defendant was a far-right party. This is somewhat ironic, given that an occasional objection to using a CC license is that one’s work could be exploited by Nazis (or other extremely objectionable parties). Of course the defendants could have correctly complied with the license (if they were smart and diligent enough), but then CC licenses contain further protections for reputation and integrity.

The photographer and plaintiff, Nina Gerlach, is an active editor of German Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects (all of which use BY-SA as their default license), and a member of Wikimedia Germany, where her spouse, Mathias Schindler is employed. The case was handled by Till Jaeger (who wrote about the case at ifrOSS, see above), a partner at the law firm JBB and a widely recognized expert in open licenses.

Gerlach said “I wanted to support the concept of free licenses that give permission for everybody to use content but come with a set of requirements, such as attribution.” She will donate any damages awarded by the court if there is money left in the end, and has already donated 100 euro to a project that created public domain and freely licensed songbooks for kindergartens.

Creative Commons is once again pleased that among millions of uses of its licenses, the courts are rarely involved — the licenses allow licensors and licensees to easily avoid transaction costs, let alone the costs of court. We are equally pleased that when a case involving a CC license is taken to court, whether to uphold the rights of the licensor (as in this case) or the licensee, that courts have held that the licenses are enforceable copyright licenses as one would expect.

English translation of ruling

Key

ZPO is the civil proceedings act,
UrhG is the Urheberrechtsgesetz (copyright act),
BGH is the Federal Supreme Court,
KG is the Berlin Supreme Court,
GRUR, NJW and WRP are journals,
to “credibly show” something is roughly to establish prima facie evidence.

it is commanded by way of preliminary injunction, due to special exigency without oral hearing, according to s. 935 ff., 91 ZPO:

1. The Defendant is, in order to avoid a penalty to be ordained by the Court for every case of non-compliance of up to 250.000,00 EUR, alternatively arrest for disobedience to court orders, or an arrest of up to six months, the latter to be executed in the person of the party chairman, prohibited, to reproduce and/or make publicly available the following photo without naming the creator and adding the license text or its full internet address corresponding to the license terms of the Creative Commons license “Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported”:

[photo of Thilo Sarrazin]

2. The Defendant has to bear the costs of the proceedings.

3. The proceedings value is set to 4.000,00 EUR.

Rationale:

I.
The Applicant has credibly shown the following:

She has created the photo mentioned in the decision and released it for further use under the terms of the so-called Creative Commons license “Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported”. According to these terms, in case of use the creator must be named and there must be either a copy of the license text attached or the full internet address in the form of the Uniform Resource Identifier must be provided. The Defendant published the photo on its website under the address www.die-rechte.info without giving the aforementioned information. The applicant first took notice of the publication on September 9th 2010.

II.
This triggers the urgent entitlement to injunctive relief according to s. 97 ss. 1 in combination with s. 19a UrhG.

The photo enjoys copyright protection as a photographic work in the meaning of s. 2 ss. 1 No. 5 UrhG or as a photograph in the meaning of s. 72 UrhG. As the Defendant put the photo on its website while in breach of the aforementioned license terms, this constituted a use not covered by the permission of the Applicant and thus an unlawful use in the meaning of s. 97 ss. 1 UrhG.

The risk of recurrent infringement as a prerequisite for the entitlement follows from the occurrence of the breach; the risk could have been dispelled only by a declaration under penalty of law to cease and desist (BGH GRUR 1985, 155, 156 = NJW 1985, 191, 191 – Penalty up to … ! – mentioning further sources).

A preliminary ruling seems also “necessary” in the meaning of s. 940 ZPO, because the Applicant cannot be expected to tolerate a possible further infringement of her rights until main proceedings are run.

The set value of the proceedings equals two thirds of the value of the main proceedings (see KG WRP 2005, 368, 369).

]]>28644New copyright-like rights considered harmfulhttps://creativecommons.org/2010/12/13/new-copyright-like-rights-considered-harmful/
https://creativecommons.org/2010/12/13/new-copyright-like-rights-considered-harmful/#commentsMon, 13 Dec 2010 08:48:48 +0000http://creativecommons.org/?p=25560Today a new German site launched, IGEL (“Initiative gegen ein Leistungsschutzrecht”; in English, “initiative against a related right”). The site, spearheaded by German lawyer Till Kreutzer, provides information on a possible proposal for a new “related right” for press publishers. Original content on the site is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Additionally, Creative … Read More "New copyright-like rights considered harmful"

]]>Today a new German site launched, IGEL (“Initiative gegen ein Leistungsschutzrecht”; in English, “initiative against a related right”). The site, spearheaded by German lawyer Till Kreutzer, provides information on a possible proposal for a new “related right” for press publishers. Original content on the site is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Additionally, Creative Commons has agreed to be listed as a supporter of IGEL. We almost never stake out a position beyond our core role of providing voluntary infrastructure to facilitate sharing. This sometimes leads to criticism of CC from both those who oppose copyright and see us as apologists, and from those who fear sharing, and see anything less than complete control, no matter how voluntary, as undermining copyright.

We take this criticism from both extremes as indication that we’re doing our job well — a job that isn’t even about copyright, let alone apologizing for or undermining copyright. CC’s job is to provide tools to help people who want to, and society overall, to get the most possible out of the sharing and collaboration made possible through communications technologies and human creativity. Copyright happens to be the legal framework that shapes how sharing and collaboration occur, so our tools operate in that framework to grant permissions in advance for sharing and collaboration.

This brings us to new related rights. Examples include sui generis database rights only applicable in Europe, proposals for special broadcastrights, which would give broadcasters a new set of exclusive rights merely for having broadcasted material, and a potential proposal for a new press publisher right to control use of non-copyrighted snippets of press material as well as specific headline wordings, for example. This potential press publisher right is what IGEL concerns.

Such new related rights, when they go into effect, make sharing and collaboration harder, for at least two reasons.

One, all communication requires some common expression. Things that fall outside of the scope of copyright (e.g., facts, abstract ideas) and copyright exceptions and limitations that facilitate quoting and critique give scope for communication, without every single sentence one utters being subject to potential lawsuit. New related and nearby rights can effectively limit the scope of what may be communicated freely, e.g., collections of facts in the case of database rights, and very brief descriptions of news items, in the case of press publisher rights — or even the facts of a news story, in the case of “hot news” restrictions recently mooted by publishers in the U.S.

New York City Gridlock by Roy Googin / CC BY-SATwo, with a proliferation of rights, it is harder to know who has exclusive control over what, or whether multiple parties have exclusive control over different rights over a work. This phenomena of too many property claims forms what is sometimes called an anticommons — overlapping exclusive claims can prevent anyone from using a work — the opposite (thus “anti”) of a commons, in which anyone may use a work under a clear, easily discernible set of rules.

The press publishers right as it was proposed now for Germany is expressly intended to make linking to (and viewing of) openly accessible press content on the web cost a mandatory fee, whenever it happens in any kind of commercial context. Together with the vagueness of the term “press product” in this sense and the unclear boundaries of commercial contexts, the new right is apt to spread uncertainty as to when a link can freely be set, thus harming a core principle of sharing and of the internet. At the same time, creators using Creative Commons licenses might suddenly find themselves falling into the scope of being a press publisher in the meaning of the new right. This could lead to the paradox situation of original Creative Commons content unintentionally becoming paid-content — that is if the publishers right is drafted to be non-waivable.

This brings us to why Creative Commons considers new copyright-like rights harmful. Such rights are clear barriers to getting the most out of sharing and collaboration and threatens to the open web, with no evidence of any countervailing benefits. New copyright-like rights make it a bit harder to share and collaborate with openly licensed materials, by constraining and confusing what can be openly licensed when multiple rights are involved. More significantly they make it harder to share and collaborate even when copyright is not pertinent, but the natural flow of using digital communication technologies is, e.g., sharing a link with a title.

In some ways increasing default restrictiveness makes the tools Creative Commons provides more valuable. Less default facilitation of sharing and collaboration means those who want to share must take careful steps to enable it — and Creative Commons has encapsulated the hard work in its tools. Furthermore, the more the default condition is lockdown, the more valuable works that aren’t fully locked down become. However, at Creative Commons we are are not simply working to maximize use of our tools, which after all are just a means to facilitate sharing and collaboration.

Finally, one should note, however one feels about the reality of current copyright law, that new copyright-like rights do harm — either adding insult to injury, or making copyright less efficient and credible as it becomes increasingly easy to obtain protection for non creative works, a threshold copyright requires for good reason. If you read German, we encourage you to visit the IGEL site and learn about the related rights proposals it addresses. We’ll also have more to say here, perhaps not about why new copyright-like rights are harmful, but how Creative Commons tools operate in a world in which such rights exist — some readers will be aware that European sui generis database rights are particularly troublesome — for our tools do have to do their best to enable sharing in collaboration in the world we find ourselves in, and as that world changes. (This is a difficult job. Please make a donation to support our work!)

Thanks to John Hendrik Weitzmann, Legal Project Lead of Creative Commons Germany, for introducing IGEL and assistance with this post.

]]>https://creativecommons.org/2010/12/13/new-copyright-like-rights-considered-harmful/feed/225560Cologne-based libraries release 5.4 million bibliographic records via CC0https://creativecommons.org/2010/03/24/cologne-based-libraries-release-5-4-million-bibliographic-records-via-cc0/
https://creativecommons.org/2010/03/24/cologne-based-libraries-release-5-4-million-bibliographic-records-via-cc0/#commentsWed, 24 Mar 2010 14:25:55 +0000http://creativecommons.org/?p=21344Last week we tweeted that Cologne-based libraries had released 5.4 million bibliographic records under CC0. This is tremendous news, as “libraries have been involved with the Open Access movement for a long time.” From the press release, Rolf Thiele, deputy director of the USB Cologne, states: “Libraries appreciate the Open Access movement because they themselves … Read More "Cologne-based libraries release 5.4 million bibliographic records via CC0"

]]>Last week we tweeted that Cologne-based libraries had released 5.4 million bibliographic records under CC0. This is tremendous news, as “libraries have been involved with the Open Access movement for a long time.” From the press release,

Rolf Thiele, deputy director of the USB Cologne, states: “Libraries appreciate the Open Access movement because they themselves feel obliged to provide access to knowledge without barriers. Providing this kind of access for bibliographic data, thus applying the idea of Open Access to their own products, has been disregarded until now. Up to this point, it was not possible to download library catalogues as a whole. This will now be possible. We are taking a first step towards a worldwide visibility of library holdings on the internet.”
…
“In times in which publishers and some library organisations see data primarily as a source of capital, it is important to stick up for the traditional duty of libraries and librarians. Libraries have always strived to make large amounts of knowledge accessible to as many people as possible, with the lowest restrictions possible,” said Silke Schomburg, deputy director of the hbz. “Furthermore libraries are funded by the public. And what is publicly financed should be made available to the public without restrictions,” she continued.

With so much library data now in the public domain, there emerges greater potential synergy for libraries and the Semantic Web:

The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center has recently begun evaluating the possibilities to transform data from library catalogs in such a way that it can become a part of the emerging Semantic Web. The liberalization of bibliographic data provides the legal background to perform this transformation in a cooperative, open, and transparent way. Currently there are discussions with other member libraries of the hbz library network to publish their data. Moreover, “Open Data” and “Semantic Web” are topics that are gaining perception in the international library world.

]]>https://creativecommons.org/2010/03/24/cologne-based-libraries-release-5-4-million-bibliographic-records-via-cc0/feed/121344CC Salon Berlin and openeverything focus – Feb. 26https://creativecommons.org/2009/02/23/cc-salon-berlin-and-openeverything-focus-feb-26/
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:52:38 +0000http://creativecommons.org/?p=12919Encouraged by the resonance of openeverything camp in December 2008, we’re helping put on a regular series of events about “openness.” This Thursday, Feb. 26, kicks off the first openeverything focus, in tandem with the CC Salon in Berlin. This month we’re focusing on Open Knowledge, delving into project like OKFN‘s Open Knowledge Definition and … Read More "CC Salon Berlin and openeverything focus – Feb. 26"

This month we’re focusing on Open Knowledge, delving into project like OKFN‘s Open Knowledge Definition and learning more about the 100,000 CC BY-SA images donated to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archives.

Each focus event draws on theory and praxis to inform the discussion. If you have a project you’d like to share, or are just curious to join the conversation, please stop by!

]]>12919Joi Ito at DLD on Creative Commonshttps://creativecommons.org/2009/01/31/joi-ito-at-dld-on-creative-commons-2/
https://creativecommons.org/2009/01/31/joi-ito-at-dld-on-creative-commons-2/#commentsSat, 31 Jan 2009 16:21:44 +0000http://creativecommons.org/?p=12606Creative Commons’ CEO, Joi Ito recently gave a talk at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. If you’ve been waiting to watch a talk introducing Creative Commons to 2009, this is your talk. Joi first hits on how CC helps innovators (especially those online) lower the transaction costs when dealing with cultural works restricted … Read More "Joi Ito at DLD on Creative Commons"

Creative Commons’ CEO, Joi Ito recently gave a talk at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. If you’ve been waiting to watch a talk introducing Creative Commons to 2009, this is your talk.

Joi first hits on how CC helps innovators (especially those online) lower the transaction costs when dealing with cultural works restricted by copyright law. Moreover, CC has the potential lower costs in much of the same way that the openness of the early Internet enabled start-ups like Google and eBay to lower their transaction costs and innovate. Joi then discusses some of the successes CC has seen in the last year, making for an great overview of what CC has been up to and where we are headed.

]]>https://creativecommons.org/2009/01/31/joi-ito-at-dld-on-creative-commons-2/feed/112606Kraftwerk Sampling Case Overturnedhttps://creativecommons.org/2008/11/21/kraftwerk-sampling-case-overturned/
https://creativecommons.org/2008/11/21/kraftwerk-sampling-case-overturned/#commentsFri, 21 Nov 2008 17:50:08 +0000http://creativecommons.org/?p=10911Kraftwerk by greenplastic875 | CC BY German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk were told yesterday by a judge in Germany that a two-second sample used by a producer in Germany did not infringe on their copyright. From the BBC (emphasis added): The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Moses Pelham’s use of a short sample from Metal … Read More "Kraftwerk Sampling Case Overturned"

German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk were told yesterday by a judge in Germany that a two-second sample used by a producer in Germany did not infringe on their copyright. From the BBC (emphasis added):

The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Moses Pelham’s use of a short sample from Metal on Metal.

Judges in Berlin said the two second extract did not infringe copyright, as his song was substantially different.